Antiquities and Other Stories

By: Cynthia Ozick

Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini, Saskia Maarleveld

From one of our most preeminent writers, a tale that captures the shifting meanings of the past and how our experience colors those meanings, now alongside four previously uncollected stories

In Antiquities, Lloyd Wilkinson Petrie, one of the seven elderly trustees of the now-defunct (for thirty-four years) Temple Academy for Boys, is preparing a memoir of his days at the school, intertwined with the troubling distractions of present events. As he navigates, with faltering recall, between the subtle anti-Semitism that pervaded the school's ethos and his fascination with his own family's heritage--in particular, his illustrious cousin, the renowned archaeologist Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie--he reconstructs the passions of a childhood encounter with the oddly named Ben-Zion Elefantin, a mystifying older pupil who claims descent from Egypt's Elephantine Island.

Included alongside this wondrous tale, touched by unsettling irony and with the elusive flavor of a Kafka parable, are four additional stories in Cynthia Ozick's brilliant, distinctive voice, weaving myth and mania, history and illusion: The Coast of New Zealand, The Bloodline of the Alkanas, Sin, and A Hebrew Sibyl.

Disappointing

I was looking forward to this book. I’ve read essays by Ozick and was hopeful of this venture in prose.

Antiquities was a pretty satisfying story. The plot and characterization were of reasonably high quality. There was a nice sense of mystery, and the outcome had its flair and drama and sense of meaning. Not a great story, but a highly acceptable one.

Sadly, I can’t give the other stories even an average rating. I was preparing a bit of a biting critique. But I find myself now not wanting to be mean or hurtful. I’ll just say that I don’t think they rise to the level of the work of a fine writer.

I hope you can find a basis to disagree if you proceed to buy.

As to the performance, I’d give good marks to the reading of Antiquities and inadequate to the others.